Amherst College - Dukehttps://www.amherst.edu/taxonomy/term/116
en"Our Fellows Deserve to Be Heard"https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2009fall/vogel/node/143627
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><table class="table-align-right-gradient" style="width:200px;" border="0" cellpadding="10"><tbody><tr><td>
<div class="mediainline">
<div><img src="/media/view/143095/original/140220060.jpg" border="0" height="300" width="200" alt=""></div>
<div align="center"><span class="fine-print">Martin Vogel holds a photo of his family.</span></div>
</div>
</td>
</tr></tbody></table><p><span class="fine-print">By Katherine Duke '05</span></p>
<p><span class="drop-cap2">“I</span>t’s so long ago. It’s so distant,” says Martin Vogel ’48, thinking back on his brother’s death. “But my brother and I were so close together that I felt like I lost my right arm.”<br><br>The Vogel boys were born a year and a half apart, the only children of a Jewish family in Brooklyn, N.Y. The older brother’s name was Bernard, but younger brother Martin knew him—and adored him—as “Jack.” The two shared a love of reading, and they both sped through advanced courses in high school, graduating two years apart, at ages 16 and 15, respectively. In 1942, the military was still offering draft deferments for college students, so Jack enrolled at Brooklyn College, and Martin soon followed him there. Martin was interested in science and medicine; Jack planned on a career in law—all of their uncles were lawyers.<br><br>As the U.S. involvement in World War II intensified, the military did away with the deferment policy. Jack was drafted first, into the Army’s 106th Infantry Division, where he rose to the rank of private first class. He was deployed to Europe in the fall of 1944. The following winter, in school without his brother, “I was sort of lonely,” Martin says, “so I went down to the Draft Board and said, ‘Draft me.’” He joined the 372nd Engineers and did guard duty at a prisoner of war camp in Germany’s Bad Kreuznach district for the remaining months of the war.</p>
<p>After V-E Day, Martin came home, but Jack did not. Their parents knew only the basics of his capture and death. “They had gotten a telegram from the War Department that he was missing and that he was a prisoner of war,” Martin says. Eventually, the military shipped Jack’s body to New York, and the family had him buried in a cemetery on Long Island. Army records indicated that Jack’s body was found, along with those of many other American POWs, in a churchyard near a small town called Berga in eastern Germany.<br><br>“Then,” Martin says, “the question was, ‘What happened to my brother?’”<br><br></p>
<p><span class="drop-cap2">O</span>thers had the same question. But when relatives of the deceased men wrote requesting details, the U.S. government confirmed only that there had been a camp in Berga where American POWs had been sent to work.<br><br>Early in 1946, Charles Vogel—one of Jack and Martin’s attorney uncles, who had worked in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps during World War I—began sending letters and questionnaires to those who had made it home from Berga. (At the time, Martin knew very little about this endeavor, hearing of it only through his parents.) Several former prisoners, including a medic named Cpl. Anthony Acevedo from the 70th Infantry Division, wrote to say they had known Jack and witnessed his death. Acevedo mentioned having kept “a record, in diary form” of the imprisonment, but his letter was deliberately vague, only hinting at disturbing conditions:</p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote><div><em>...I would rather not discuss the details of what happened but I will say that he was made to work in the mines. He, as well as everyone of us, suffered from malnutrition. This made him easy prey to pneumonia. He didn’t have the strength or will to fight the disease and finally died.... </em></div></blockquote>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<table class="table-align-left-gradient" style="width:200px;" border="0" cellpadding="10"><tbody><tr><td>
<div class="mediainline"><span class="inline"><img src="/media/view/143096/original/140220070.jpg" class="image original" border="0" height="300" width="200" alt=""></span></div>
<div class="fine-print" align="center">Martin Vogel holds a document from his uncle, who'd gathered names and addresses of Berga survivors.</div>
</td>
</tr></tbody></table><p>Vogel soon gathered names, addresses and testimonies from the majority of the survivors, and it became clear from the testimonies that Berga was a place more horrific than any standard POW camp. <br><br>Vogel passed his findings on to the War Crimes Branch of the U.S. War Department, but first, with his determination and outrage mounting, he demanded and received assurance that the information would be used to help build the case against those who ran the camp.<br><br>On Sept. 3, 1946, at the site of Germany’s Dachau concentration camp, the commanders of Berga—Sgt. Erwin Metz, a former bank official and factory manager, and Capt. Ludwig Merz, a former teacher—were brought before a military tribunal on charges of assaulting and killing POWs (in Metz’s case) and deliberate mistreatment of prisoners (in both men’s cases), according to the 2005 book <em>Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble</em>, by <em>New York Times</em> col­umnist Roger Cohen. Metz passed off responsibility to Merz, who in turn claimed to answer to S.S. 1st Lt. Willy Hack, the book says. (East German authorities sentenced Hack to death in 1949, and he was hanged in 1952.) Though dozens of survivors told Charles Vogel that they were willing to testify, none was called in person to the Dachau trial, and only 12 of the prisoners’ written testimonies were used to supplement the information gathered on Berga by the U.S. War Crimes Investigating Team. The book says that the prosecution drew little attention to the ample evidence that the Nazis chose the POWs to labor and die at Berga specifically because they were Jewish or otherwise “undesirable”—that these Americans might be counted among the victims of what would become known as the Holocaust. On Oct. 15, 1946, the tribunal sentenced Metz and Merz to death by hanging. <br> <br>But on June 11, 1948, Charles Vogel received shocking news: a letter from the Civil Affairs Division of the War Crimes Branch stating that authorities had commuted Metz’s sentence to life imprisonment and Merz’s to a mere five years. Vogel and relatives of other Berga victims fired back letters of protest, and Vogel gathered signatures from survivors and next-of-kin on a petition that asked President Harry Truman, Defense Secretary James Forrestal and Secretary of State George Marshall to “use your full powers to procure at least a RETRIAL to which American G.I. survivors can be sent to testify, if direct reversal of the commutation of their sentences cannot be obtained, so that these two barbaric murderers can receive the full justice they merit by American standards.”<br><br>“Full justice” never came. Metz’s prison term was again commuted, to 15 years, and he was released on parole in 1954. By 1955, both he and Merz walked free.<br><br>For the families, the only option was to carry on with their lives. Martin Vogel left the Army in 1945 and enrolled at Amherst as a transfer student the following year. He graduated with a degree in biology in 1948, but his plans to go straight to medical school were thwarted: “At that time, there was a quota on Jewish students,” he says. So he stayed at Amherst for an extra year and earned a master’s degree in biochemistry. He was then accepted to Boston University School of Medicine, and following several years of residency, he settled into a private gastroenterology practice in Framingham, Mass. The young doctor married Phyllis Mishara, a Wellesley graduate, in 1953, and together they had four children. The oldest, James, attended Bowdoin College; the youngest three all graduated from Amherst: Paul in 1980, Deborah in 1982 and David in 1984.<br><br>The Vogel children always knew their father had lost a brother in World War II, but the family talked little about what had happened. “I think it still was kind of raw and painful for my dad to explore this in a casual, dinner-table conversation,” David says. But Martin thought often of Jack, and over the years he searched for more details about Berga. After Charles Vogel died in the 1960s, Charles’ son gave Martin a box of the attorney’s old documents, which Martin stored away in a closet. One of the few times Martin spoke about his brother’s death was on a trip to Israel, where he met a writer named Mitchell G. Bard, who later visited Martin’s home to study Charles’ documents. The research was for Bard’s book <em>Forgotten Victims: The Abandonment of Americans in Hitler’s Camps</em>, published in 1994. “He was one of the first people who really became interested in Berga,” Martin says. But Martin eventually lost touch with the author. In the 1990s Martin and his wife visited her alma mater to hear a lecture by a prosecuting attorney from the Nuremberg Trials, and there they met Dan Steckler, a Berga survivor who, coincidentally, also lived in Framingham. “He knew my brother very, very well,” Martin says, but like Acevedo decades earlier, “he was very vague.” The Nuremberg prosecutor didn’t say much about Berga either.<br><br>In 2003 PBS aired a documentary by Charles Guggenheim, <em>Berga: Soldiers of Another War</em>. While informative, it taught Martin little that he didn’t already know. It didn’t tell him what he wanted to know. It didn’t tell him anything about his brother. <br><br>So it went until late last year, when Martin got a call from his son David telling him to check the CNN Web site, where there was a brief <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/11/11/acevedo.pow/index.html">Veterans Day article titled “WWII vet held in Nazi slave camps breaks silence: ‘Let it be known.’”</a> The vet was Anthony Acevedo.<br><br>The article expressed Acevedo’s anger that the government had never recognized what he and his fellow soldiers had endured at Berga, and it quoted from his diary. Among his recollections were the last words of a young soldier named Bernard Vogel. <br><br></p>
<p><span class="drop-cap2">A</span>mazed, Martin Vogel immediately phoned the article’s main author, CNN.com Senior Producer Wayne Drash. “We both, basically, were crying,” Drash recalls. “He had been searching for answers to his brother’s death for six decades.” Drash put Vogel in touch with Acevedo and with another Berga survivor from Jack’s division, Myron Swack.</p>
<p>“All of a sudden,” Vogel remarked in a <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/11/20/worldwar.two.folo/index.html#cnnSTCOther1">phone conversation with Acevedo and Drash</a>, taped for CNN.com, “the whole past has come up in the present.” Finally, he could hear the voices of those who had been there with his brother—who had lived the story of Berga.<br><br>Dec. 16, 1944, marked the start of the Ardennes-Alsace campaign—more commonly known as the Battle of the Bulge. The “bulge” consisted of hundreds of thousands of German troops, advancing 50 miles across Allied lines in the wooded Ardennes Mountains region of Belgium in Adolf Hitler’s last-ditch effort to turn the war around. <br><br>More than 76,000 U.S. soldiers were wounded, killed or captured in the six-week campaign. Cpl. Anthony Acevedo of the 70th Infantry Division and Pfc. Bernard “Jack” Vogel of the 106th were among those captured and loaded into freezing railroad cars and taken to a prison camp called Stalag IX-B, near the town of Bad Orb, Germany. IX-B was already overcrowded with many thousands of POWs from Poland, France, the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Europe.<br><br>The Americans, segregated into their own barracks, eventually numbered as many as 4,700. Acevedo recalls today that the stalag had no toilets—sewage flowed into trenches around the barracks. The prisoners grew so hungry that one of them attacked the camp’s cook with a cleaver in an effort to steal food from the kitchen. Until the Nazi guards could find the culprit, they made everyone stand outside for 12 hours in the snow.<br><br>Soon the guards began demanding information from the Americans about their pasts, their families and their ethnicities, Acevedo says. This was a clear violation of the 1929 Geneva Convention, which states that POWs must not be coerced into disclosing anything more than their names and ranks. Beyond interrogating him about his family’s business dealings in Mexico, Gestapo officers tortured Acevedo: “They put needles in my fingernails to try and make me talk.” The U.S. Army had issued the soldiers dog tags that identified, among other information, their religions—C for <em>Catholic</em>, P for <em>Protestant</em>, H for <em>Hebrew</em>. The Jewish prisoners knew enough to fear for their safety, Acevedo says, and some did their best to hide or alter their tags. <br><br>Guggenheim’s documentary and Cohen’s book <em>Soldiers and Slaves</em> both detail how, in late January 1945, the guards lined up the American prisoners and ordered, “<em>Alle Juden, einen Schritt vorwärts</em>”—“All Jews, one step forward.” When not enough came forth, Acevedo says, the guards picked out those who supposedly looked Jewish, including Vogel, as well as troublemakers and other “undesirables,” including Acevedo. They selected exactly 350 young men and packed them onto another train to be brought to a new location: Berga.<br><br>“They made it look like as if it was going to be a very nice place, much different from the prison camp,” Acevedo says. “It turned out to be a slave camp.”<br><br>Martin Vogel has never read Cohen’s book, which, as part of an exhaustive account of the events before, during and after the Berga imprisonment, does include details about Jack and quotes and images from Acevedo’s diary. According to the accounts by Cohen and Guggenheim, the Americans from Stalag IX-B arrived to find a section of the Berga camp already populated by European civilians—some of them children, and most wearing striped uniforms and Stars of David. Brought in from Buchenwald and other concentration camps, these prisoners were too wasted and weak for hard labor, and the Nazis were shooting and hanging more of them every day. The Americans were still relatively strong and healthy, so Lt. Hack put them to work expanding and deepening 17 interconnected tunnels dug into the banks of the Weisse Elster River. Cohen’s book explains that these tunnels were to house an underground ammunition factory. <br><br></p>
<table class="table-align-right-gradient" style="width:200px;" border="0" cellpadding="10"><tbody><tr><td>
<div class="mediainline"><span class="inline"><img src="/media/view/143088/original/14022008b.jpg" class="image original" border="0" height="213" width="300" alt=""></span></div>
<div align="center"><span class="fine-print">Pages from the once-secret diary of Army medic Anthony Acevedo</span></div>
</td>
</tr></tbody></table><p>Though he wasn’t assigned to the tunnels, Acevedo worked with five other U.S. medics to tend to those who were. After inhaling slate dust from morning to night, the laborers would come back coughing up blood and would sleep huddled together for warmth in the lice-infested barracks, according to the accounts by Cohen and Guggenheim. Their rations—typically bread made with sawdust and thin soups of putrid greens—provided barely enough calories for survival. “They wouldn’t let us use the river water,” Acevedo remembers. “We tried to eat the snow as much as possible.” When the medics would ask the guards about getting medical attention for the ill and injured, the reply was always, “No. There’s no doctor here.” So they made do with the aspirin and bandages they had with them. Acevedo also started his secret diary, recording in sketches and brief paragraphs the events and conditions at Berga. He dutifully listed the names of his fellows, their ailments and, more and more often, their causes of death: pneumonia, malnutrition, dysentery, grippe.<br><br>Meanwhile, on March 2, three American POWs—including Johann “Hans” Kasten—squeezed through the camp’s barbed-wire fence and escaped into the surrounding woods. They were captured and sent to a different stalag, according to the Cohen and Guggenheim accounts. At IX-C, Kasten reported the situation at Berga to British officers, who arranged for a truckload of Red Cross relief packages to be delivered to the labor camp. The prisoners of Berga needed the food and medicine more desperately than ever, but Sgt. Metz withheld them, Cohen explains in his book. Acevedo wrote in the diary that by the time Metz handed the packages over, almost a week later, yet another American had starved to death. Other prisoners—including Morton Goldstein, a member of Jack Vogel’s division—tried to get away but were also caught. “Goldstein’s body was returned here today for burial,” Acevedo noted in his diary. “He was shot while attempting to Re-escape. So they say but actually [he] was recaptured and shot thru the head.” Metz pulled the trigger.<br><br>About two weeks after Goldstein’s death, Vogel teamed up with Pvt. Israel Cohen and decided to make a break for it. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/11/20/worldwar.two.folo/index.html">Myron Swack told CNN</a> that the two men ran across a nearby field but didn’t get far. When the guards brought them back, Metz beat Cohen until he temporarily blacked out, according to <em>Soldiers and Slaves</em>, and the guards splashed Vogel with icy water, cut his already-meager rations down even further and assigned him extra labor in addition to his work in the tunnels. Swack told CNN that, as examples to the other prisoners, both escapees had to stand outside without food or water for two days, until they collapsed.<br><br>Afterward, back in the barracks, Acevedo and another soldier attempted to revive Vogel, reminding him, “Look: you have your family, your loved ones, back home. We have to get you going. Come on, get up. Talk to me. Come on, Bernie.” Acevedo remembers that he took a boiled egg and “tried rubbing it into his lips, to try and see if he can bite on it, and—no. To no avail. He wouldn’t.” Drained of his will and mumbling, “I want to die,” Vogel drifted away. He was 21 years old. <br><br><br><span class="drop-cap2">A</span>round that time, with Allied forces rapidly approaching, German officials quickly shut down the Berga camp and led the prisoners south toward the Bavarian town of Cham. (<em>Soldiers and Slaves</em> provides details about the march, including a map.) Starting on April 5, they marched 15 to 20 miles every day. “This isn’t very good for our sick men,” Acevedo wrote. The weak were hauled in wagons; Israel Cohen was on the bottom of a wagon load and soon suffocated under the growing pile of bodies, according to <em>Soldiers and Slaves</em>. Over the 18 days of the march, nearly 50 soldiers died. Every so often, Acevedo noted in the diary, the Americans would pass the corpses of some of the former Buchenwald prisoners, left by the sides of the road with bullet holes in their heads. <br><br>But as the casualties mounted, so did the hope of rescue. One morning, Acevedo remembers, “we heard shooting, machine guns, the rumbling of the tanks.” The guards called for everyone to move out, but knowing that their countrymen were approaching, the prisoners wouldn’t budge. Acevedo lay down and covered himself with straw. “<em>Raus! Raus!</em>” the guards yelled—“Get up!” “We couldn’t walk, we told them, if our buddies were dying,” he says.<br><br>The stalling tactic worked, and soon rescue came in the form of American tanks. At first, the liberators didn’t recognize the skeletal figures. “They thought that we were Germans, camouflaged, when they saw us in the shreds of clothes,” says Acevedo, who had dropped from 149 pounds down to 87. But soon they heard orders to climb into the tanks. “We were liberated today April the 23, 1945,” the diarist wrote, underlining the beautiful date twice.<br><br>The survivors were deloused and fed. U.S. Army photographers documented their emaciation, and military officials questioned them. Before their ultimate return to the States, each soldier had to sign a “Security Certificate for Ex-Prisoners of War,” stating that, in order to protect “the interests of American prisoners of war in Japanese camps” and any future wars, they would never “reveal, discuss, publish or otherwise disclose to unauthorized persons information on escape from enemy prison camps” and that “the authorship of stories or articles on these subjects is specifically forbidden.” Acevedo interpreted this to mean that “we weren’t to open our mouths and say what we had gone through”—hence the conflicted and evasive tone of the letter he wrote to Charles Vogel. It was a mystery to the veterans why the details of their imprisonment had to be a secret. Roger Cohen notes in his book that many were content not to talk about it much at all—some were ashamed of things they’d done under the desperate circumstances, and most preferred to focus on the future rather than remain captive to the traumas and horrors of the past. Those who tried to tell their families and friends about their ordeal were often met with disbelief.<br><br>Then, a year ago, when CNN published the article about Acevedo on its Web site, readers “were so blown away by it,” CNN’s Wayne Drash says. “They kind of demanded me to follow the story, to do more on it—the fact that U.S. soldiers were held as slaves by Nazi Germany and that our government had failed to recognize them.” He wrote more articles. Readers posted hundreds of comments and began lobbying for a response from the Secretary of the Army, who in turn ordered the Pentagon to investigate. U.S. Reps. Joe Baca of California and Spencer Bachus of Alabama called for Congress to give the 350 soldiers “long overdue recognition for their service and sacrifice.”<br><br>Recognition finally came on June 6, 2009, in a <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/06/08/berga.recognition/index.html">ceremony at a hotel banquet hall in Orlando, Fla.</a> In front of about 100 former World War II POWs and their families, six Berga survivors were presented with American flags flown over the Pentagon in their honor, and one survivor—Pvt. Samuel Fahrer, who had been a medic—received the Bronze Star. Representing the U.S. Army, Maj. Gen. Vincent Boles explicitly acknowledged the truth about Berga: “It wasn’t a prison camp—it was a slave labor camp.” In a <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/06/08/berga.recognition/index.html#cnnSTCVideo">video interview</a> with Drash for CNN, Boles said that the Army’s intent in having the prisoners sign the “Security Certificate” was solely to prevent them from talking about escapes and those who had tried to help them escape. “We didn’t explain it correctly, and it was construed as a secrecy document, which they could never talk about.”</p>
<table class="table-align-left-gradient" style="height:363px;width:200px;" border="0" cellpadding="10"><tbody><tr><td>
<div><img src="/media/view/143094/original/140220050.jpg" border="0" height="300" width="264" alt=""></div>
<div class="fine-print" align="center">Martin Vogel with a certificate signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt</div>
</td>
</tr></tbody></table><p>However, Acevedo believes—and Martin Vogel agrees—that the Army did want the survivors to remain silent about their entire imprisonment. They suspect that the military did not want foreign authorities or companies to learn about the underground factory being built at Berga, lest they glean dangerous information about new weapons that the Germans were developing. Acevedo was among 16 Berga survivors who did not attend the ceremony in Orlando, in part because he was “very upset” that it did not take place in Washington, D.C. There are more recognition ceremonies being planned in the survivors’ local communities, though, and when one happens near his current home in California, he says he’ll go. Now 85, Acevedo is eager to share his story, and copies of his diary, with anyone who cares to learn more. “I share it,” he says, “because I still think that a lot of our fellows deserve to be heard.”</p>
<p>Martin Vogel is sharing the story, too. Wayne Drash spent three days at the Vogel household poring over the box of documents inherited from Charles Vogel, noting the details of the lawyer’s early campaign for justice. This year, a distant relative of the Vogels in a government records office sent the family an enormous additional set of papers about the war crimes trial, which Vogel has also passed on to Drash.<br><br>David Vogel is glad for the catharsis that the past year has finally allowed his father. “We sat around a table at my parents’ house with my children and my brother’s children, and so we had our generation and the next generation listening to the story,” he says. “It’s come to life for them.” Several of Martin’s grandchildren have since written reports for school about what happened to their Great-Uncle Jack.<br><br>Bernard “Jack” Vogel and 349 other Americans worked and suffered and starved in 17 tunnels on the banks of a river in a faraway town. Those tunnels have long since been sealed up, but the story is out, and it will survive. <br><br><span class="fine-print">Writer and editor Katherine Duke is the college’s Ives Washburn Fellow. This is her second cover story for <em>Amherst </em>magazine.</span></p>
<p><span class="fine-print">Photos by Samuel Masinter '04<br></span></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/114">Katherine Duke</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/116">Duke</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1507">pow</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2824">Germany</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3192">holocaust</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9747">CNN</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/10461">veterans</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/11732">Vogel</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/11733">Martin Vogel</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/11734">World War II</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/11735">Nazi</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/11736">prisoner of war</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/11737">Berga</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/11738">David Vogel</a></div></div></div>Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:34:00 +0000kdduke143627 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2009fall/vogel/node/143627#commentsOpen Secretshttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/campusbuzz/node/100569
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="fine-print">By Katherine Duke '05</span></p><p><span class="drop-cap2">F</span>rank Warren has close-cropped hair and a soft voice. He wears blue jeans and glasses. He looks like the average 40-something husband and father. But, as he knows better than anyone, outward appearances often conceal extraordinary stories. Warren is, in fact, the creator of a famous and influential blog; he has published four popular books and launched two travelling art exhibits. He has earned the title of “the most trusted stranger in America.”A simple idea that he set in motion a few years ago has since helped to change, and even save, lives around the world. Standing on stage in Johnson Chapel in front of a rapt audience, he introduced himself simply: “My name is Frank, and I collect secrets.”<!--break--></p><p></p><table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5"><tbody><tr><td><div align="center"><span class="inline"><span class="inline"><img class="image original image-margin" src="/media/view/99615/original/postsecret.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="236" alt="image"></span></span></div><i class="smaller">Frank Warren of PostSecret speaks in Johnson Chapel</i></td></tr></tbody></table>Warren brings his PostSecret project to colleges and arts centers around North America, and on March 10—to the excitement of fans like me—his tour and the Amherst College Program Board brought him to Amherst. He explained how, four years ago, he printed up a batch of postcards with instructions: People were invited to use the cards to express any truth that they’d never told anyone before and to mail the cards to Warren anonymously at his home in Germantown, Md. “After work, I would drive my car to Washington, D.C., at night and solicit secrets from strangers on the streets,” he said. “Yeah, it was as weird as it sounds.” For a while, he kept the project itself a secret to everyone outside his family; he couldn’t explain exactly what he was trying to do or why, and he never knew how people might react.<p>The postcards worked: first the secrets trickled in from around the D.C. area, and soon they were pouring in from different states, different continents. Warren began a <a href="http://postsecret.blogspot.com">PostSecret blog</a>, publishing a small sampling of cards every Sunday. To date, he has received more than 300,000 secrets—as many as 200 each day, every one of which he reads and retains in a bin in his family’s house. As I was typing this sentence, the blog was viewed for the 222 millionth time.</p><p>During his hour-long presentation, Warren told us of the highlights of his involvement in the project: meeting people who have contributed secrets, inspiring a college student to “out herself” as an anorexic and to educate her classmates about eating disorders, assisting in a marriage proposal. He also showed us a few of the confessions that never made it onto the blog or into the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw_0_12?url=search-alias%3Daps&amp;field-keywords=postsecret+frank+warren&amp;sprefix=postsecret+f">PostSecret books</a>. They’ve arrived not just on postcards but on X-rays, on deflated balloons, on banana peels and bags of coffee. Some are silly, such as the one that reads, <i>“I like to watch Dr. Phil drunk.”</i> (“I think there’s two ways you can interpret that,” Warren said, “and they’re both pretty funny.”) Others are tales of lost love and cries for help. One of Warren’s favorites is from a former patient in a mental health ward, now recovered; it ends with the message <i>“There is hope.”</i></p><p>Having lost an uncle and a friend to suicide, Warren once volunteered for the <a href="http://www.hopeline.com/">National Hopeline Network</a>, answering phones for a suicide-prevention hotline. Secrets about depression and self-harm show up in his mailbox with alarming frequency. He made the point that, in the United States, suicide is twice and common as homicide. “The statistics are even more staggering on college campuses,” he added. “In our group tonight, in the next 12 months, 50 of us will think about ending our lives. And six of you, right now, are sitting by somebody who will actually try.” The PostSecret project has raised awareness of this problem and more than $500,000 to help prevent it, with visitors to the blog at one point donating enough money to save Hopeline from imminent bankruptcy. Warren believes that keeping secrets sometimes contributes to feelings of frustration, isolation and hopelessness that can turn deadly. “Sometimes, when we think we’re keeping a secret,” he said, “that secret’s actually keeping us.” One of the most effective ways to help those in despair, he believes, is simply to listen—to let them bring forward whatever they’ve been holding back.</p><p>The evening included an opportunity for those in attendance to share their own secrets. (The audience consisted almost entirely of Amherst and Five College students, and, curiously, the vast majority were women.) Students lined up at two microphones—some to ask questions about PostSecret; several to thank Warren for his project; others to make confessions about everything from fashion to family to sexual assault. The crowd responded with applause and hugs. Warren closed by reading a postcard he was inspired to send to himself after a stranger’s secret reminded him of a trauma from his own childhood.<br><br>As the audience filed out to meet Warren and get their books signed, I noticed a young woman in front of me crying. She was releasing some powerful emotion (whether it was fear or grief or joy, and what exactly was behind it, I will never know), and she was leaning on a friend.</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/114">Katherine Duke</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/116">Duke</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9875">Warren</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9876">Frank Warren</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9877">PostSecret</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9878">secrets</a></div></div></div>Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:59:05 +0000kdduke100569 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/campusbuzz/node/100569#commentsThe Blame Gamehttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/campusbuzz/node/86443
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="fine-print">By Katherine Duke '05</p><p><span class="drop-cap2">A</span> certain current Amherst student—let’s give her the pseudonym “Cassie”—and her friend made a decoration for <a href="/alumni/events/family_weekend">Family Weekend</a> this year: a pumpkin with an <i>A</i> carved in it. “We put a strobe light in it,” Cassie says. “I was so proud of it. All my friends said it was the coolest thing they’d ever seen.”<br><!--break--><br>They placed the pumpkin outside of Morris Pratt Dorm, and a few weeks later, over Homecoming, it met its doom. Cassie blames another friend, a member of the <a href="/athletics/teams/fall/football">football team</a>, for smashing it. “He is <i>known </i>for smashing things,” she says. Last year he got in trouble for throwing dorm furniture and apples, she claims. Plus, the football team was upset about having lost to Williams. And this guy lives in Morris Pratt, and “one of his friends did rat him out.” Cassie’s friend, she says, denies her charge.<br><br>This would seem a fairly straightforward whodunit. But, as she and I and the 20 or so other students are learning in the <a href="/campuslife/interterm/courses">Interterm course</a> <a href="/campuslife/interterm/courses#Figuring%20Out%20Who">“Figuring Out Who to Blame,”</a> pointing a finger is a complicated process with layers of fascinating psychology behind it. “How do we explain others’ actions?” asked instructor <a href="/people/facstaff/pvaldesolo03">Piercarlo Valdesolo ’03</a>, the Robert E. Keiter ’57 Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology. “Every action, every event, there’s some degree of ambiguity. You can’t really know what happened in any given situation.”<br><br>To fill in the blanks, Valdesolo has explained, people rely on preexisting knowledge and ideas (which psychologists call <i>schemas</i>). In making a <i>causal attribution</i>—that is, deciding that her friend must have smashed the pumpkin—Cassie was using what she knew of his personality, his past behavior and what kinds of things have happened during past Homecomings. She was inferring what his mood might have been after a losing game. She was also drawing upon stereotypes about football players being rowdy and violent—and though stereotypes are an inevitable part of the human thought process and can be helpful in problem-solving, they don’t always hold true. Even the testimony of the friend who snitched on him might well be false or flawed: people often have motivation to lie, and even when trying to tell the truth, we suffer distortions of memory.<br><br>In the class, we’re studying these and other complexities of the blame game. We’ve watched <i>The Thin Blue Line</i>, the 1988 documentary by Errol Morris about a man serving a life sentence after he was falsely accused and convicted of murdering a police officer in Texas. We’ve discussed the 1999 case in which New York City police, thinking that West African immigrant Amadou Diallo was reaching for a gun, opened fire, killing him; he was actually reaching for his wallet. We’ve discussed the McMartin trial, in which an allegation of sexual abuse at a preschool in California spiraled into a witch hunt. Clearly, the psychological processes behind causal attribution can have major legal ramifications—even life-or-death consequences.<br><br>More fun are the stories, such as Cassie’s, that students bring in from their real lives. “Emma,” while in high school, was called down to the police department on suspicion of burglarizing her town, just because a neighbor saw Emma’s friends trespassing on his lawn and assumed, and later misremembered, that Emma must have been there too (she was actually out-of-state at the time). “Margo” had a distinct recollection, from when she was 5, of lying to her mother, saying that Peter Pan had flown in her window and cleaned her bedroom. Years later, her mother helped her realize that no such conversation had ever happened—Margo had fabricated not only the story about Peter Pan, but the entire memory of telling that story. “Kurt” told of the time a high school friend asked him to hide cases of empty beer cans from a party, and Kurt spent the whole day strategically concealing the cans all around his house. When his mother came home, the yelling began immediately. He couldn’t imagine how she could have figured out his scheme. “Then I come out to the kitchen,” Kurt said, “and the cases that the beer came in were sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor, where I had left them.” This, says Valdesolo, is a classic example of <i>inattentional blindness</i>: being so focused on certain details that we completely miss what should be really obvious.<br><br>Valdesolo contributed a story from his own time at Amherst: A student who lived on his hall once called the dean and accused Valdesolo of assault for slamming a door in her face. Our instructor took 20 minutes and even drew a map on the chalkboard to convince us that he did nothing wrong—that the whole thing was a misunderstanding based on unfortunate timing; that it was Valdesolo’s friend who slammed the door, not even knowing that anyone was behind it; and that the dean was right to eventually drop the charges based on testimony from professors and coaches about Valdesolo’s character and record. But, Valdesolo pointed out to us, “I could be lying, for all you know.” <br><br>Hmm…</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/114">Katherine Duke</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/116">Duke</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1405">psychology</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2624">interterm</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/5539">interterm courses</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/8267">Piercarlo Valdesolo</a></div></div></div>Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:38:32 +0000kdduke86443 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/campusbuzz/node/86443#commentsBen Bishop ’09 Answers: What Is Jeopardy!?https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/campusbuzz/node/83977
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="fine-print">Interview by Katherine Duke '05</p>
<p><span class="drop-cap2">S</span>ince its first, black-and-white incarnation, created by Merv Griffin in the early 1960s, <i>Jeopardy!</i> has built a reputation as the thinking person&rsquo;s game show. Amherst has helped prepare many trivia geeks to do battle with the big blue board: As a senior, Gwyneth Connell &rsquo;00 represented the Jeffs in the 2000 College Championship. Novelist and attorney Scott Turow &rsquo;70 towered over the competition in <i>Celebrity Jeopardy!</i> in 2006. And even though I ultimately came in a distant third, I consider my own <i>Jeopardy!</i> game, which aired in April 2008, among the luckiest and most fascinating experiences of my life.</p>
<!--break-->
<p>When Ben Bishop &rsquo;09, an economics major and co-captain of the Amherst squash team, found out that he had been chosen for the show, he dropped by my office to get tips from a veteran. I lent him<i> Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs</i> by 74-time <i>Jeopardy!</i> champion Ken Jennings. After Bishop&rsquo;s tapings in October 2008, he came by again. &ldquo;How did it go?&rdquo; I asked. Sworn to secrecy about the outcome, he said only, &ldquo;It was fun.&rdquo;</p>
<div id="container"><a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">Get the Flash Player</a> to see this player.</div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.ats.amherst.edu/flashvideo/swfobject.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var s1 = new SWFObject("http://www.ats.amherst.edu/flashvideo/mediaplayer.swf","mediaplayer","320","240","7");
s1.addParam("allowfullscreen","true");
s1.addVariable("width","320");
s1.addVariable("height","240");
s1.addVariable("file","http://www.ats.amherst.edu/flashvideo/studentvids/bishop.flv");
s1.addVariable("image","http://www.ats.amherst.edu/flashvideo/studentvids/bishop.jpg");
s1.write("container");
</script>
<p>In early December, millions of viewers found out exactly how it went: The 21-year-old Seattle native competed on five episodes and won four of them. His $115,800 total is the highest earned by any contestant so far this year, which means that he&rsquo;s headed to Las Vegas in January 2009 for the Tournament of Champions, where he&rsquo;ll try for another $250,000. &ldquo;Fun,&rdquo; indeed.</p>
<p>I sat down with Bishop to learn more about his rise to game show stardom. I did not require him to phrase each answer in the form of a question. Here is what he had to say:</p><h5>Campus buzzing</h5><p>&ldquo;For four or five days before I was on the show, I was reading the almanac. I was reading stuff that I knew that I <i>knew</i>, but I just wanted to make sure that I had the names correct, and things where I knew a couple different people that I wanted to separate my mind, [such as] the difference between Cezanne and Gauguin. My roommates helped out a lot. Garrett [Snedeker &lsquo;09] put together a summary of 1960s-through-1980s sitcoms&mdash;something that I know nothing about. I borrowed a buzzer from the Amherst Quiz Bowl team to practice ringing in.&rdquo;</p><h5>Behind the scenes</h5><p>&ldquo;Everyone [on the <i>Jeopardy!</i> crew] was really nice; that helped. [The contestant coordinators] deal with new, nervous contestants every week, so they&rsquo;re good at lightening the mood. The other contestants are just as happy to be there as you are. There&rsquo;s a three- or four-hour orientation in the morning, so everyone gets to be nice and friendly&mdash;and then they try to beat each other up, onstage.</p><p>&ldquo;I was impressed at how good [host Alex Trebek] is at his job. He does make a few errors, reading the clues, which they go back and re-record. But he&rsquo;s very good with the interviews, and during the commercials, he entertains the crowd. You get the idea that he&rsquo;s pretty smart and that he&rsquo;s genuinely interested in the material. He seems like he&rsquo;s not just doing it to make the money.&rdquo;</p><h5>On the board</h5><p>&ldquo;On my first show, one of the first questions was about [the trade of] cotton, and that&rsquo;s one of my big academic interests; I did a Special Topics [course] on it. It was sort of a running joke, before the show, that I would get a question about cotton. And it was, like, the third question, so that really helped settle me down. The other running joke was that I would get geography categories, and then, in the first show, in Double Jeopardy, I got <i>two </i>geography categories. Once those came out, I was pretty sure that I had a good chance of winning.</p><p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s funny: I took Astronomy 11 last semester, and there was a category about stars, and for the $1,000 or $2,000 clue, the answer was <i>nebula</i>, and I remembered [Professor of Astronomy George Greenstein] showing us pictures and talking about them in class. There was a [Final Jeopardy] question straight out of <i>Brainiac</i>. <i>[The clue was: &ldquo;The first and middle names of this breakfast cereal &lsquo;spokesman&rsquo; are Horatio Magellan.&rdquo; See the answer at the end of this article.]</i></p><p>&ldquo;The things that I ought to be good at, I probably am not: pop culture and movies and TV. All my friends from home made fun of me for getting an Angelina Jolie question wrong. I missed a couple of sports questions early in my first episode.&rdquo;</p><h5>The competition</h5><p>&ldquo;I felt sort of bad; I think [the other contestants] were intimidated by me, and it was weird for me to be inspiring such fear. After my first two shows, we went and ate lunch, and they were all giving me this stare from afar. But they were all pretty nice people.&rdquo;</p><h5>On the money</h5><p>&ldquo;The money isn&rsquo;t real to me yet. First of all, they won&rsquo;t pay me until 120 days after the show airs. And when you&rsquo;re playing the game, you don&rsquo;t really think of it like money&mdash;it&rsquo;s just points. I wagered pretty aggressively throughout the show. Obviously, if somebody said, &ldquo;Hey, I&rsquo;ve got a question for you about the names of countries. Would you be willing to bet $20,000 that you know the right answer?&rdquo; No, I probably wouldn&rsquo;t. But that&rsquo;s not how I think about it&mdash;it&rsquo;s just points to help me win the game. I haven&rsquo;t really thought about how to spend the money yet.&rdquo;</p><p><i>[The answer to the clue above: Who is Cap&rsquo;n Crunch?]</i></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/114">Katherine Duke</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/116">Duke</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/454">TV</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1122">trivia</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1248">television</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3159">jeopardy</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4523">scott turow</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4578">gwyneth connell</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9202">Bishop</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9203">Ben Bishop</a></div></div></div>Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:15:00 +0000kdduke83977 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/campusbuzz/node/83977#commentsThe Game Planhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/campusbuzz/node/79245
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="fine-print">Story and photos by Katherine Duke '05</p> <p><span class="drop-cap2">A</span>s an innocent Amherst first-year in the fall of 2001, I developed an addiction that has a hold on me to this day. I got sucked into a strange world that’s difficult to explain to those who haven’t visited: a world where we know each other by first and middle initials, last name and class year (I’m kdduke05); where “snooping” and “snitching” are not only socially acceptable but appreciated; and where people who have never laid eyes on each other regularly engage in vigorous debates and develop lasting friendships. <!--break--></p> <table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0" cellpadding="8" width="160"><tbody><tr><td><div class="mediainline"><span class="inline"><img class="image standard" src="/media/view/78727/standard/close-up%2Bcupcakes.jpg" border="0" width="160" height="238" alt="image"></span></div> <span class="gray">Gillian Woldorf '01 (gmwoldorf01) baked cupcakes for the Planworld tailgate.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p>The text-based online community now known as <a href="https://neon.note.amherst.edu/planworld">Planworld</a> is ancient compared to LiveJournal, MySpace and Facebook; it has its roots in “the VAX”—the computer processor that Amherst used in the 1980s. Students and faculty could post their “plans” (brief updates on their research and writing) and check one another’s plans. Over the decades, students and alumni—including Jonathan Welch ’84 (jhwelch), John Manly ’85 (jwmanly), Alex Hochron ’02 (anhochron), Seth Fitzsimmons ’02 (snfitzsimmon), Johnnie Odom ’00 (jlodom00), Tosin Onafowokan ’08E (oonafowokan08) and others—have managed and updated Planworld, adding new features and giving it a Web interface. </p> <table class="table-align-left-gradient" border="0" cellpadding="8" width="100"><tbody><tr><td><div class="mediainline"><img class="image standard" src="/media/view/78724/standard/3%2Bumbrella.jpg" border="0" width="134" height="300" alt="image"><br><span class="gray">Heather Van Dusen '07 (hrvandusen07), Christopher Burnor '06 (cmburnor06) and James Buchanan '09 (jbuchanan09) planned on rain.</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Nowadays, we Planworld citizens (mostly young alumni, with a few current students, significant others and friends) log on daily, check one another’s plans and write whatever we want to share. We post poems, news articles and YouTube clips. We pick one another’s brains with “Plansurveys.” We vent about the personal, the professional and the political. Mostly, we follow the ups and downs of one another’s lives (Someone got laid off. Someone got engaged! Someone got mugged. Someone got a kitten!).</p> <p>We also use our plans to arrange get-togethers, and a bunch of us decided that this year’s Amherst-Williams Homecoming game should mark the first-ever Planworld tailgate. Parker Morse ’96 (pjmorse96) and Sandy Klanfer ’09 (sklanfer09) did the organizing and grilling. I showed up to Pratt Field with my Amherst employee badge and my camera. Others arrived from Vermont, Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C., decked in Amherst gear. We shook hands and hugged and—when necessary—introduced ourselves by our screen names, finally connecting faces to some of the lives we’d been reading about for months and years. Current students talked to those long-since graduated: “What was your major?” “What floor did you live on?” “Your baby is <i>so cute</i>! I’ve been looking at all your pictures!” We chatted about grad school and job searches, pausing only occasionally to check the score of the game. And when the weather crossed over from drizzle to full-fledged rain, we pulled out umbrellas, huddled up and sheltered each other.</p> <p>Later, Johanna Lunglhofer (who went to a different college and doesn’t have a plan… <i>yet</i>…) asked me and her boyfriend, Solomon Granor ’04 (ssgranor04), how many of those friends we’d actually known when we were students at Amherst. Not many, we realized—we’d met most of them after we graduated, through Planworld. “It’s kind of a community-after-the-fact, huh?” she said. Exactly.</p> <p class="special-notice2">Want to join Planworld? Log in <a href="https://neon.note.amherst.edu/planworld">here</a> with your Amherst username and password.</p> <table class="gradient-background" border="1" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="0" width="715"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><table border="0" cellpadding="20" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td align="center" valign="top" width="300"><div class="mediainline"><img class="image standard" src="/media/view/78731/standard/Woldorf-Reichgott%2Bfamily.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="221" alt="image"><br><span class="gray">Woldorf and Heather Reichgott (hreichgo@planworld.net) with their daughter, Tovah, who has been a beloved presence on Planworld all her life.</span></div></td> <td align="center" width="300"><div class="mediainline"><img class="image standard" src="/media/view/78725/standard/1996-2012.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="203" alt="image"><br><span class="gray">The tailgate spanned 16 class years, from Parker Morse '96 (pjmorse96) to Keith Wine '12 (kwine12).</span></div></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><img class="image standard" src="/media/view/78728/standard/geo%2Bgirls.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="229" alt="image"><span class="gray"><br> Three geology majors who rock Planworld: Lisa Smith '09 (lsmith09), <br> Marissa Drehobl '09 (mdrehobl09) and Sienna Tinsley '08 (stinsley08).</span></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/7">alumni</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/12">homecoming</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/19">tailgate</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/114">Katherine Duke</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/116">Duke</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2741">plan</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/8916">Homecoming Weekend 2008</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9028">Planworld</a></div></div></div>Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:27:00 +0000kdduke79245 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/campusbuzz/node/79245#commentsJust Old Enoughhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2008_summer/tradition/youngalumnireunion/node/61217
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="fine-print">By Katherine Duke '05</p><table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><div class="fine-print"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/60163/original/reunion%2Bzumbyes.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="218" alt="image"><br><span class="fine-print">Former Zumbyes sing at Reunion.</span><br></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="drop-cap2">V</span>anessa Hettinger ’04 and
Marni Grambau ’04 roomed together for two years at Amherst. Imagine
their surprise when they returned for Reunion 2008 and were assigned to
share a room again. “We’re gonna have a sleep­over—stay up all night
talking,” joked Grambau, who works for the American Board of Internal
Medicine in Philadelphia. It would be like old times, she said.<br><br>Of
course, for some of us, “old times” aren’t very old. In addition to the
usual reunions for every class at five-year intervals, this spring
marked the first Young Alumni Reunion for classes that graduated one to
four years ago. This included my own class, and though I wore my
official employee-of-Amherst nametag and relaxed in my office in Converse between events, I was every bit the nostalgic returning alum.<br><br>At
Commencement rehearsal in 2007, Betsy Cannon Smith ’84, executive
director of alumni and parent programs, announced that a Young Alumni
Reunion was in the works, and by the end of that Commencement, the
Class of ’07 was already buzzing about reuniting the following year.<br><br>To
prepare for the reunion, a committee of young class officers surveyed
their classmates to find out what programs would be of most interest.
“Because a lot of us are either not yet in an established job or
looking to change jobs, the idea of networking sessions and looking at
career options seemed topical and useful,” explains Roz Foster ’05,
reunion chair for her class and a substitute teacher in California. The
committee invited members of older reunion classes to speak about their
careers in law, entertainment, the nonprofit sector and other fields.</p><table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><div class="mediainline"><span class="inline"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/60162/original/reunion%2Bdance.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="204" alt="image"></span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>I,
personally, was more interested in several panels hosted by classes
from earlier decades. Two such panels gave me tips on how to get my
writing published (after my gig at this fine magazine ends), and two
others gave me insight into the past and current state of liberal arts
education in the United States. (The consensus of the professors and
alumni on that panel: Amherst kids of my generation have a thicker
course catalog, more diverse classmates, higher grades, cushier dorms
and greater opportunity and inclination to undertake big, impressive
projects than “the Amherst man” did back in their day. Everything else
is debatable.) I also dined with my fellow Young Alumni under a tent on
Valentine Quad, though I had to catch the last bus home before the
dancing really got started. This was fitting: even as a student, I was
never much of a party animal.<br><br>In all, more than 200 young alumni
took part in the reunion. None of my closest friends came back, but I
see them often enough anyway. It was a treat to reconnect with the
people with whom I share just a few quirky memories—my next-door
neighbors from senior year, for example, and the fellow ’05 who was
born on the same day as I was, but on a different continent.<br><br>Considering
that I live in Amherst and work at the college, I was surprised at how
transported I felt, back to a time when the campus belonged to us. It
was nice to feel, for a weekend, not like I was too old to be a
student, but like I was just barely old enough to be an alumna.<br><br>Cannon
Smith expects next year’s Young Alumni Reunion to feature more recently
graduated performers and artists. I’ll be here to watch.</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/10">reunion</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/114">Katherine Duke</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/116">Duke</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/229">Class of 2004</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/230">Class of 2005</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/231">Class of 2006</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1455">Class of 2007</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/5289">young alumni reunion</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/7509">young alumni</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/8310">2008 reunion</a></div></div></div>Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:44:57 +0000kdduke61217 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2008_summer/tradition/youngalumnireunion/node/61217#commentsClose to Homehttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/campusbuzz/node/61107
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="fine-print">By Katherine Duke ’05 </span><br><br><span class="drop-cap2">O</span>ne of the many reasons I chose to attend Amherst College was that it was far away. Or, far <i>enough </i>away. My parents could do the three-hour drive fairly easily when I wanted them to—but <i>only </i>when I wanted them to. The other serious contender, Vassar, was only an hour from my hometown. I cringed when I realized it got the same radio stations. I have nothing against my family or my high school, but I wanted my college experience to feel separate from them. So Amherst it was.<!--break-->But there are a few members of the Amherst Class of ’12 whose drive up to Orientation this week will take only minutes. When Letha Gayle-Brissett, assistant director of Alumni &amp; Parent Programs, counted nearly a dozen first-years from the Amherst area (Worcester to Pittsfield, Mass.), she was amazed. She contacted Brent Alderman Sterste ’00 and Owen Freeman-Daniels ’01 of the Pioneer Valley Alumni Association, and together they arranged a welcome reception for these newcomers.<br><br>As a Campus Buzz reporter and member of the Association, I attended the reception on Sunday, Aug. 10. Over soft drinks and hors d’oeuvres in the Alumni House, some local ’12s and their families mingled with graduates who have settled nearby—many, including me, to work at the college.</p><table align="right" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><div class="mediainline"><span class="inline"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/61548/original/reception.jpg" border="0" width="532" height="394" alt="image"></span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br>I spoke first with Freeman-Daniels, the new leader of the Association. He grew up in Northampton and lives and works there today. While a student at Amherst, he was teased for being a local. But he loved the school and chose it because he knew how much the surrounding community and other nearby colleges had to offer. He wanted to assure these students that home for them is “as close as you want to make it. You can go into ‘The Amherst Bubble’ for four months and then emerge. Or you can be out and about.” <br><br>“I really like the area,” Freeman-Daniels said, “and I’ve come to like it more than I did in college and certainly than I did in high school.” I agreed: As a student, I remained largely oblivious to the businesses and events beyond the campus, but the longer I live and work in the Pioneer Valley, the more I appreciate its geography, wildlife and cultural opportunities.<br><br>Roy Jung ’12 started his Amherst College career while still a senior at Amherst Regional High School, taking a discrete math course with Professor David Cox and playing violin in the college orchestra. He plans to continue pursuing these interests, and many more, now that he’s officially an undergrad here. <br><br>For Todd Volkman ’12, of Pittsfield, as for most of the other local students, Amherst’s proximity was one of the few things that worked against it. “I wanted something a little bit farther away from home,” he said. “But it’s just such a fantastic school that spoke so much to what I’m looking to get out of my college experience that I was thrilled to come here.” It showed: throughout the reception, I never once saw the smile leave Volkman’s face. His father, Karl Volkman, graduated in 1980 and was likewise thrilled that his son would also be an Amherst man.<br><br>T.J. Keyes ’12, of Shutesbury, represents the youngest of multiple generations of an Amherst College family. Keyes’s great-uncle was the beloved Robert “Gramps” Keyes, who worked with the Campus Police for decades and then as a Dining Services checker until his death in 2004. Today, both of Keyes’s parents, Cindy and Ted Keyes, and several other relatives are employees of the college. “The deciding factor was the quality [of the education],” he told me. “Them working here and it being so close to home was really the only con.” His mom and dad, standing nearby, didn’t seem to take offense.<br><br>“Amherst is just a little bit too close for me,” agreed Luke Menard ’12, who lives in Belchertown and whose siblings attended UMass. “But I’m hoping, since it’s such a small school, I’ll have better relationships with my peers, and I won’t have to go back home every weekend. I’m sure it won’t be a big deal.” Though she understands her son’s need for independence, Johanne Menard is “real happy he’ll be close.”<br><br>“You’re worried about ‘the pop-in’ and everything,” Freeman-Daniels tells the first-years later in the evening, “and believe me, it’s not easy to duck your parents.” But he assures them they’ve made a good choice. At Amherst, they’ll be surrounded by other outstanding students from around the world, and everyone will help educate and inspire one another.<br><br>Before I go, I chat with my friend Gillian Woldorf ’01, who has brought along the youngest <i>potential </i>local Amherst student: Her daughter’s nametag reads <i>Tovah Woldorf 2030?</i> Tovah has spent all four months of her life in South Hadley. No pressure, kid, but your mom’s college friends would all love to see you, 18 years from now, back at the Alumni House, being welcomed at a reception like this.</p><p class="special-notice2">If you are an Amherst College graduate living in the Pioneer Valley, and you would like to get involved with the Pioneer Valley Alumni Association, contact Owen Freeman-Daniels '01 at<a href="mailto:owenfreemandaniels@gmail.com"> owenfreemandaniels@gmail.com</a>.</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/7">alumni</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/114">Katherine Duke</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/116">Duke</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/120">Campus Buzz</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2406">Alumni House</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2438">Pioneer Valley</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3435">first year students</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/5349">alumni and parent programs</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/7143">class of 2012</a></div></div></div>Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:00:04 +0000kdduke61107 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/campusbuzz/node/61107#commentsLife with Neaveyhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2008_summer/neavey/node/60650
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="fine-print">By Katherine Duke '05</p><table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><div class="fine-print"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/60148/original/neavey%2Bporch%2Bswing.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="208" alt="image"></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="drop-cap2">I</span>t’s a balmy Saturday in January—one of the few times of year in Houston when it’s not too hot and humid to spend the afternoon outdoors. Keith Millner ’92 and his wife, Kelly, have pushed her daughter, Neavey, in a stroller around the peaceful residential neighborhood, and now the family sits in the side yard of their ranch-style home. The girl drifts in and out of sleep as her stepdad rocks her on the porch swing.<br><br>Suddenly, Neavey breaks her usual silence with a small moan. Her body stiffens, and her face turns red. Kelly jumps up to get a special magnet, the size of a cell phone; if she can use it quickly to activate the electronic implant in her daughter’s chest, it could stop this episode from progressing into a “giant barfing seizure”—the kind Neavey’s been having all too often lately. They’re lucky, this time, and after a few seconds, before Kelly can even reach the magnet, the seizure passes with no mess, and Neavey relaxes and falls back to sleep.<br><br>Doctors can offer no diagnosis more specific than “epilepsy” to name these incidents. Nor can they explain why the 9-year-old can’t talk or walk, why she can’t move or think like other children her age. Her parents might never know the exact cause or biological mechanism of the disorder that keeps her in a state of intellectual infancy. <br><br>Soon, Keith and Kelly take Neavey into the house, seat her in a special chair, cover her with a smock and give her a bottle of milk, into which they’ve mixed a dose of the seizure drug Keppra. Then Keith prepares her dinner—chicken ground up in the food processor, with a side of vegetable baby food—and measures out her other prescriptions: four capsules of Zonegran, also for the epilepsy; one and a half Klonopin pills to quicken and deepen her sleep (because seizures come most often in the intermediate stages between waking and sleeping); and several vitamins. Keith opens or grinds up each pill, sprinkles it onto the food and feeds Neavey the precise number of spoonfuls. Some of the vitamins are bitter, but, her parents believe, she’s lost her sense of taste anyway.</p><p>After dinner, Kelly undresses Neavey, and Keith lifts the girl into the bathtub (a tricky feat, as she’s all skinny arms and legs). Kelly puts on some country and folk music and talks to her daughter as she bathes her, ties back her wavy brown hair and eases her into a clean diaper and pink pajamas. Keith and Kelly lay her down to sleep on a bed next to theirs. A baby monitor will let them know if she has any more seizures this evening, while they’re eating their own dinner, and then they will go to bed and rest up for another day.</p><table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><div><img class="image original" src="/media/view/60144/original/neavey%2Bkelly.jpg" border="0" width="200" height="300" alt="image"></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="drop-cap2">K</span>elly McCord, an elementary school teacher, and Karl Ittmann, a professor of European history at the University of Houston, learned in 1998 that they were expecting a child. Kelly’s blood was negative for the antigen known as the Rh factor, while the fetus was Rh-positive. As is standard procedure in such cases, doctors gave Kelly injections to prevent her immune system from developing antibodies against Rh, which could attack a fetus in a future pregnancy. Otherwise, the nine months progressed normally.<br><br>Neave Marie Ittmann was born on April 26, 1999. (Neave is an alternative spelling of the traditional Irish name Niamh; it rhymes with <i>sleeve</i>.) Through her first months of life, she appeared healthy and got all the usual immunizations, plus a hepatitis B vaccine. That year, public concern about that vaccine’s safety and necessity had already prompted the Centers for Disease Control and the American Academy of Pediatrics to advise delaying it for babies not at particular risk for hepatitis, but Kelly says that doctors, family and friends suggested she and Karl allow it anyway.<br><br>In July, at 3 months old, Neavey began to develop strange little tics. They were barely noticeable at first—her leg would twitch momentarily, or her eyes would lock and her pupils dilate—but they grew more frequent. It took Kelly’s brother, trained as an EMT, to recognize what was really going on: the baby was having seizures.<br><br>By September, Neavey was having 10 to 20 seizures a day, leaving her too tired and weak to eat, drink and take her anti-seizure medication. Her parents checked her into the hospital. With her brain in a drugged state for six weeks, Neavey fell off the developmental charts. “She was a normal 4-month-old when she went into the hospital,” Kelly says, “and she came out in early October worse than an infant—she couldn’t even suck a bottle.” Karl’s sister, a neonatologist, helped Neavey to regain some ground, and Kelly took her to get every therapy and test she could find.<br><br>Over the next two years, Kelly and Karl held out hope that their normal child would come back to them, because Neavey was making gradual progress. “Mind you,” says Kelly, “you’d have to watch it with time-lapse photography.” But then an MRI revealed atrophy in the language center of the toddler’s brain. The confirmation of <i>brain damage</i> shook Kelly to the core.<br><br>Perplexingly, though, the brain damage didn’t appear to be caused or exacerbated by Neavey’s seizures, nor was it nearly extensive enough to explain her profound cognitive impairment. “With her level of brain damage,” Keith notes, “she could’ve gone to Amherst.” Her epilepsy has never been directly connected to her retardation, and, except for mild scoliosis, Neavey’s body is perfectly healthy. <br><br>The <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/spec-grps/parents.htm#myths">CDC </a>maintains that the benefits of immunization vastly outweigh any risks and that there are major scientific flaws in the few <a href="http://www.immunizationinfo.org/immunization_science.cfm?cat=1">studies</a> that have presented a causal link between vaccines and disorders such as autism. But, like thousands of parents nationwide, Kelly is convinced that her child’s development was derailed by all those injections before and shortly after birth—specifically, by thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in some of the vaccines. (At one point, the family was involved in legal action over the vaccine-injury issue, but the claim was ultimately denied.) In recent years, thimerosal has been removed from the vaccines routinely given to children in the United States. <br><br>Whatever its cause, Neavey’s condition affected Kelly and Karl’s physical and mental health. Grieving the loss of the child she might have been, tending to the child she had become and worrying about what lay ahead took its toll. It contributed to the collapse of their marriage. <br><br><span class="drop-cap2">K</span>eith Millner arrived at Amherst in 1988, joining his brother Michael ’90. He sang with the Zumbyes and formed enduring friendships with a room group of eight other men. When he looks back, Keith sees a young man who was basically happy, who had plenty of fun, but who, at the same time, was troubled.<br><br>He says he spent college trying to escape his family problems—including the death of his mother during his freshman year—and feeling guilty for being who he was: straight, white, upper-middle-class and male. “I had this sense that what defined me and my place in the world was struggling against the weight of history that has put me up on this pedestal,” he says. His inward mantra, he recalls, was <i>If you’re passively supporting the system, you’re actively oppressing people.</i> But this angry activism filtered itself through his gentle voice and nurturing demeanor. “I didn’t want to make it worse,” he says simply. “I wanted to make it better.”<br><br>Each semester, he gravitated toward learning about “the Other,” double-majoring in anthropology and black studies. “I went to women’s and gender studies classes, history of homo­sexuality classes, black studies classes, where nine classes out of 10, I would be in the minority.” Rhonda Cobham-Sander, now the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Black Studies and English, was Keith’s adviser for his senior thesis on representations of race in African-American children’s picture books, and she stayed in touch with him for years after he graduated. “His thoughtfulness around issues that didn’t directly affect him—that’s the thing that always amazed me about him,” she says.<br><br>Also, says Cobham-Sander, “he was one of the first young men I met at Amherst who worked with children.” He’d had jobs at summer camps during high school, and at Amherst, he took a work-study position at Woodside Children’s Center, a daycare center affiliated with the college. “That, I think, led fairly naturally to an idea that I’d be interested in teaching,” he says.<br><br>His senior year, he did a student-teaching project with Barry O’Connell, now the James E. Ostendarp Professor of English. Following graduation, Keith taught at a primary school while earning his teaching certification through the University of Col­­orado Denver, where he later received a master’s degree in early childhood education. After a brief stint in the summer of 1998 teaching in a rural village in Tanzania—where, Cobham-Sander says, “he pushed that outsider thing to the absolute limit”—he got a job in the still-emerging field of online education, as well as a second master’s, from Harvard, in teacher leadership.<br><br>In 2002, Keith found work as an elementary literacy coach and went back to Denver—for good, he thought. He attended a training session for the job and, afterward, maintained e-mail correspondence with one of the trainers. Her name was Kelly McCord, she lived in Houston, and she had a husband and a daughter.<br><br><span class="drop-cap2">A</span>t first, Keith’s e-mail and phone contact with Kelly was purely professional: he would ask her advice about issues he faced in the classroom. But she began to open up about her own work and family life, including Keith on the e-mail list when she sent updates about her daughter’s condition. They became friends. After Kelly’s marriage ended, the friendship grew into something more.<br><br>There were plenty of reasons to stop the romance before it even got started. “I felt like, My God, what am I doing even beginning to explore a relationship with this person who’s in Houston and sort of tied there because she’s got this kid?” Keith says. “Kelly, to her great credit—I’m very grateful, to this day—kept at bay my compulsion to do what’s reasonable and logical.”<br><br>Still, Keith was cautious about getting to know Neavey. He didn’t want to form a bond with her until he was certain of his commitment to her mother. And his experiences as a teacher had made him, as a young man, doubt he could handle a disabled child of his own—let alone take on a little girl for whom the euphemism <i>special needs</i> doesn’t begin to cover it. Some friends, including other parents of developmentally disabled children, were tempted to advise him to run. “We admired that he took a lot of time for discussion with family [and] friends and did a lot of soul-searching,” says his friend Connie Morgan. “We, selfishly, were scared for Keith.”</p><table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0" width="149"><tbody><tr><td><div class="fine-print"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/60146/original/neavey%2Bmeal.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="200" alt="image"></div><div class="fine-print" align="center">Kelly and Keith use baby spoons to dole out Neavey's food.<br></div><span class="fine-print"></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p>When the long-distance relationship entered its second year, Keith began spending more time with Neavey, his initial discomfort with her messy feedings, constant seizures and deep impairments rapidly fading away. In part, this was because he experienced, in his words, “an evolution” in his attitude toward disability. “But also,” he says, “I think, on some level, I just fell in love with her.” He felt proud to be with her in public and happy to spend quiet evenings with Kelly, watching Neavey sleep. “Looking at this kid and being with this woman—it just felt like my life.”<br><br>In 2004, Kelly made plans to move with Neavey to Denver. But when Karl insisted on keeping Neavey in Houston and maintaining joint custody, Keith moved to Houston instead. <br><br>Keith and Kelly got married in 2006 in the mountains near Denver. Relatives, neighbors and Keith’s entire Amherst room group gathered to celebrate. At the ceremony, Keith spoke vows not only to Kelly but to his new stepdaughter as well (see <a href="/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2008_summer/neavey/vows">“Vows”</a>).That day, thanks to problems with her medication, Neavey suffered more than 100 seizures. But the 7-year-old looked beautiful in her crocheted sweater and long blue skirt, a turquoise pillow behind her head.</p><p><span class="drop-cap2">I</span>n Keith and Kelly Millner’s house in Houston, the shelves and walls display children’s books, African and African-American sculptures and paintings, Kelly’s teaching awards, a poster from a Zumbyes concert and pictures of their little girl. Neavey alternates, every few days, between their house and Karl’s, just minutes away.<br><br>Keith is a program manager and reading and vocab­ulary specialist at the Children’s Learning Institute at the University of Texas Houston Health Science Center. He is also an adjunct instructor for Westwood College On­line. Kel­ly does some work at CLI, too, and is a substitute teacher in the public elementary school where she used to teach full-time.</p><table class="table-align-left-gradient" border="0" width="152"><tbody><tr><td><div class="fine-print"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/60149/original/neavey%2Btherapy.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="200" alt="image"></div><div class="fine-print" align="center">Therapists regularly arrive at the house to treat Neavey.<br></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>During the week, Keith and Kelly drive Neavey in their custom, wheelchair-accessible van to and from another public school, where she’s in class with several other severely retarded children. Teachers challenge Neavey to press buttons, shake rattles and turn her big blue eyes toward whoever is speaking to her. “Most of the work is around getting her to initiate interaction with anything outside of herself,” Keith says. “She’s not great at that, but responding to it is the next best thing.” Most parents don’t turn on violent cartoons and loud rap music for their elementary schoolers; they wouldn’t make sharp trilling noises in their children’s ears. But Kelly and Keith laughingly acknowledge that they do all these things for Neavey—anything to get a rise out of her. “It’s like she gets this jolt,” Keith says, “this reminder of what it feels like to be alive, to be aware.”</p><p>Lately, Neavey seems, to her parents, happier and more responsive to people. At age 3, when Keith met Neavey, she would become absorbed in repetitive hand-rubbing and teeth-grinding—self-stimulating behaviors often exhibited by autistic children. But that 3-year-old could also sit up, carry a spoon to her mouth and cross a room with a walker; around her fourth birthday, over a matter of months, she lost most of those abilities. Her motor skills have been in general decline ever since. (Her parents describe this in terms like “nosedive” and “crater.”) Keith explains: “The reason that Neavey gets worse is just because she’s growing. Little bodies are easier to manage, and she was proportionately much stronger as a little kid.” Equipment that she’s outgrown is in the garage, while the standing frame (a vertical contraption that keeps her in a standing position), special chairs and toys for her current therapies are in a spare room that Keith and Kelly call “the parking lot.” The physical, occupational and speech therapists visit twice a week to work with her on skills such as rolling, standing, holding up her head, grasping her toys and chewing.</p><table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0" width="121"><tbody><tr><td><div class="fine-print"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/60142/original/neavey%2Binhaler.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="200" alt="image"></div><div class="mediainline" align="center"><span class="fine-print">Keith administers an inhaler to Neavey, who is sick with a cold.</span><br></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Her epilepsy is largely, though not entirely, under control through a cocktail of drugs and vitamins. In 2004, having tried every other treatment, her parents had doctors implant a vagus nerve stimulator (VNS) just below her left collar bone. This was a fairly new therapy with widely varying results in other epileptic children. Similar to a pacemaker, the device sends regular, mild electric signals up the vagus nerve from her neck to her brain and can also be activated by an external magnet to curtail a seizure in progress. “There was hope, certainly, that there would be a magic bullet,” Keith remembers. But the VNS ruined Neavey’s appetite and wasn’t doing very much to stop the seizures, so they’ve had it turned down to a very low setting. When Neavey has a seizure, they still “wave the stupid magnet,” Keith says, almost like a magic wand.</p><p>The real trouble comes on the rare occasion that Neavey catches a bug. “If Neavey gets sick, all the world stops,” Kelly says. Congestion and lethargy make it harder for her to swallow food and meds; a stomach virus can make her vomit them up; a fever can change the way she metabolizes them. Any irregularity in her dosing then catches up with her, a few days or weeks later, when she could have hundreds of seizures.</p><table class="table-align-left-gradient" border="0" width="121"><tbody><tr><td><div class="fine-print"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/60150/original/neavey%2Bvan.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="210" alt="image"></div><div class="fine-print" align="center">After pulling over the car, Kelly helps her dehydrated daughter.<br></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Neavey isn’t especially medically fragile, but there’s no telling what problems might arise tomorrow, or next year, or when she’s an adult. Having no diagnosis means she has no prognosis. The most her neurologist can predict is that her seizures will change, in frequency and type, over the years. And, of course, she will grow and develop physically, if not cognitively. For now, she’s still small and thin enough to fit into toddler-sized diapers. But her body will become more cumbersome, her care more complicated.<br><br>Keith and Kelly have read about the so-called “Pillow Angel” case, in which parents had doctors stunt the growth of their severely disabled daughter and remove her reproductive organs to increase her comfort and the ease of her care. The case sparked an international debate about the best interests, dignity and autonomy of children and of people with disabilities. While Neavey’s parents say they would never take such drastic measures, they empathize. “We know how friggin’ hard it is,” Keith says, “and the prospect of Neavey getting bigger and older is terrifying to us.”</p><table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0" width="91"><tbody><tr><td><div class="fine-print"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/60145/original/neavey%2Bliving%2Broom.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="207" alt="image"></div><div class="mediainline" align="center"><span class="fine-print">The family in a quiet moment.</span><br></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Kelly sometimes can’t help but foresee the worst. “The way that Kelly responds, any time her phone rings when we don’t have Neavey, is panicked, instantly,” says Keith. Kelly fills notebooks with the details of her child’s daily routine—medication dosages, diaper changes, even what side they lay her on to sleep—knowing that these records could help in an emergency. Moreover, they may be a factor when Neavey turns 18 and Kelly will seek legal guardianship. “If I’m lucky, Neavey will die before I do,” she says. “She won’t be here without us.”<br><br>Many of Keith and Kelly’s siblings and friends are now raising healthy, active, “normal” children. “Their kids are smart and able, and they go to soccer practice and private school, and their lives are fancy and a million miles a minute,” Keith says. “And they’re good people—I don’t think they’re in any way disdainful of us—but they can be dismissive of the possibility that [our life] could be their life. Literally, at any minute, it could be them.”<br><br>Some people have trouble with Neavey’s drooling, her silence, the subtlety—or absence—of her interpersonal response. “Neavey’s just a mirror,” Keith theorizes. “She literally couldn’t hurt you in any way, so if there’s something about Neavey that makes a person uncomfortable, that’s something in them.” What upsets Kelly is when friends and family can’t work through their sadness over Neavey’s condition so they can move on from it. “They feel the grief and sorrow and fear that having Neavey puts into our life,” Keith says. “They don’t identify and connect with the joy and comfort she brings.”</p><table class="table-align-left-gradient" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><div class="fine-print"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/60141/original/neavey%2Bhair.jpg" border="0" width="243" height="300" alt="image"></div><div class="fine-print" align="center">Kelly brushes Neavey's hair.<br></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="drop-cap2">A</span>nytime Neavey vocalizes or succeeds in therapy, it’s a victory, an occasion to break out the video camera. Kelly takes pleasure in dressing her in colorful outfits and bringing her to a hairstylist. When Neavey gives Keith a smile or laugh, he thinks, “That is all I ever need in my life.”<br><br>Yet she might be seen as the ultimate Other—whatever is going on in her unusual mind remains hidden in there. She is less aware and responsive than most pets, Keith and Kelly say. “Neavey challenges our ideas of what it means to be human,” Keith says, “because she doesn’t qualify in any of the ways that most of the people I’ve ever known define themselves as individuals or as human.” Some people see her as an “angel”—and Keith appreciates their reverence. But, he knows, Neavey is a person. “And the way that I know she is, is because that’s the way I love her.”<br><br>In anthropology class at Amherst, Keith learned that we study the Other mainly to learn about ourselves. And from Professor Cobham-Sander, he heard this message: “History is not a linear progression,” she wrote as he struggled with his thesis. “We fight not because we know that things must get better but because we know they can get worse.”<br><br>Keith sees more problems than ever in the world, but he is no longer so angry. In an e-mail to <i>Amherst</i>, he wrote:</p><blockquote><div>[I]n my life with Neavey, I am, in some ways, becoming an adult, reaching what feels like the real lesson of what I was learning about passion and service and struggle when I was a young adult at Amherst. … I am compelled by a life of service not because I can make things better. I am not even compelled anymore by a belief that I struggle so things won’t get worse. Neavey’s not going to get better, and while my struggle to care for her certainly slows the speed of her decline, she will get worse. Why I serve, simply, is because I want to. It feels good to me. It is who I am, and I feel most myself and like my best self when I am with Neavey and dedicating myself completely to her care. I serve out of selfishness and because I am in love.<br></div></blockquote><p>As far as anyone can tell, Neavey holds no grudges, expectations or worries—she lives in the moment. Keith and Kelly try to do the same. “If we started thinking about all those ‘what-ifs,’ it would paralyze us,” Keith says.</p><table class="table-align-right-gradient" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><div><img class="image original" src="/media/view/60147/original/neavey%2Borange.jpg" border="0" width="300" height="200" alt="image"></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>They do hope their future will include another child. The couple has undergone genetic counseling and testing; Neavey’s condition does not seem to be hereditary. So far, though, they’ve been unable to conceive, and the two years of trying have proved “really sad.” Still, Keith and Kelly remain optimistic, especially now that Keith has had a surgical procedure that doctors say will improve their chances. The medical costs put a strain on their already tight finances (as would the fees for adoption, though they’re seriously considering that route). Even if they do have a baby, there are a host of other worries. “Having two infants at home, one of whom weighs 50 pounds, is kinda scary,” Keith says—and they’re nervous about the possibility of twins, or of bringing home another child with special needs.</p><p>Of all people, Keith and Kelly know how little control they have over what their family might look like and who their children might be. But they know they’ll be okay, no matter what. “That’s part of what I take to be a gift of my life with Neavey. Now I know we can pretty much pull off anything,” Keith says. “If I thought about it for a second, I’d realize I have no idea how we’re going to manage it. But it’s not scary, because we’ve already figured out so much in our lives—we’ll figure out whatever comes next. We will.”<br><br><span class="fine-print">Katherine Duke ’05, a writer and editor at <i>Amherst</i> magazine, is the college’s Ives Washburn Fellow. <br></span><br><span class="fine-print">Keith Millner ’92 can be reached at <a href="mailto:kamillner@yahoo.com">kamillner@yahoo.com</a>.<br><br>Photos by Samuel Masinter '04<br></span></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/7">alumni</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/114">Katherine Duke</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/116">Duke</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/121">magazine</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/225">Class of 1992</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3770">disabilities</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/7570">Amherst magazine</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/8259">Millner</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/8260">Keith Millner</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/8261">Neavey</a></div></div></div>Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:30:24 +0000kdduke60650 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2008_summer/neavey/node/60650#commentsMy Life: Constance Congdon, Playwright-in-Residencehttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2007_fall/mylifecongdon/node/54653
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h3>Telling stories</h3><table align="right" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><div class="mediainline"><span class="image standard"><img src="/media/view/31207/standard/constance_congdon.jpg" border="0" alt="Constance Congdon" title="Constance Congdon" width="201" height="300"></span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><h3></h3><p class="fine-print">Interview by Katherine Duke ’05</p><p><span class="drop-cap2">P</span>ulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner has called Constance Congdon “one of the best playwrights this language has produced.” Congdon received her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1982. Highlights of her 30-year career include her original play <i>Tales of the Lost Formicans</i> (produced more than 200 times worldwide, most recently in Cairo and Helsinki) and an adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s <i>A Mother</i> with Olympia Dukakis in the lead role. Over the summer, she premiered <i>So Far: The Children of the Elvi</i> and adaptations of Molière’s <i>The Imaginary Invalid</i> and Carlo Goldoni’s <i>The Servant of Two Masters</i>. Her new verse version of Molière’s <i>Tartuffe </i>will be published in 2008 in a single-volume critical edition by W.W. Norton, as well as in the upcoming <i>Norton Anthology of Drama</i>. Congdon has won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the W. Alton Jones Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. A strong believer in America’s academic and nonprofit theaters, which she says play a crucial role in “keeping new work alive,” Congdon has taught playwriting at Amherst since 1993.</p><h5><br></h5><h5>On early theatrics<br></h5><p>My father was a beautiful singer and could do some dancing. He was on a small circuit in western Kansas; he always danced and sang with me. I made a little puppet theater between my bed and my parents’ bed. Snap, Crackle and Pop were three of the puppets, and they had many adventures. When I was 8, I wrote a play called <i>Peter Pan Meets God</i>.<br><br>Flash forward: In junior high school, I played a toothless old hillbilly woman in a play called <i>A-Feudin’ Over Yonder</i>. The first real play I saw was <i>Cyrano de Bergerac</i>, and I’ll never forget it, because Cyrano entered from behind me in the audience in that opening scene. Of course, I loved musicals; I hadn’t seen any, but I would stand on my bed and perform entire albums. I wrote comedy sketches in high school. I remember the first time one of those was performed: I was too nervous to sit in the auditorium; I went up in the balcony and sat and listened to people laugh. Oh, my God, that was such a high!</p><h5>On brand-new adults</h5><p>I feel so connected to the world through my students. I like being part of the brand-new-adult transition into what they sometimes call “the real world” (though that’s just stupid, because this world we’re in is just as real as can be). I was up for the head of playwriting at Yale, which would be teaching graduate students, and I panicked. As soon as the dean from Yale called me and said, “Well, we’ve made a decision, and it’s not you,” I just started to laugh—I was so relieved. At that point I’d decided I wanted to stay at Amherst, to teach undergraduates.</p><h5>On Molière and McMansions</h5><p>I did a new verse version of <i>The Misanthrope</i> for American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Opening night went well. I knew something was up when the board members, who could tell who I was because I was the shortest person in the room, would come up and just pat me. My new verse version of <i>Tartuffe</i> premiered recently at the Two River Theater Company in New Jersey. The director set it in a McMansion in Texas. She didn’t change a word, and it was fantastic. It sounded so Texan! Just put an accent on it!</p><h5>On controversy</h5><p>My play <i>Casanova </i>was produced in 1989 at the Joseph Papp Public Theater with an amazing cast—La Tanya Richardson (Mrs. Samuel L. Jackson) and actor Ethan Hawke making his stage debut. But it didn’t get a single good review. That play was involved in the whole National Endowment for the Arts controversy. It contained each of the things Sen. Jesse Helms said art cannot have, and more: homosexuality, the sex act, a rape, bad language (a lot of that), a lot of naming of people’s private parts. I got criticism from the right wing, but I certainly also got it from the other side—the feminist movement. They said, “How can you put rape in a play?” and “How can you portray child abuse?” Well, because there’s a story in Casanova’s life about that. But people only see what they want to see. The critics said I was bashing men. For a woman writer, it’s really hard to get the universal; it’s always seen as “from a female point-of-view.” I hate that. If a man had written <i>Casanova</i>, I think it would have been dealt with in a different way. A couple of years later, my play <i>Dog Opera </i>premiered at that theater to good reviews.</p><h5>On current favorites</h5><p>Right now, I’m all about [British humorists] Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. I also love Simon Peg and Nick Frost—their most recent film was<i> Hot Fuzz</i>. As long as I’m on the Brits: Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders—absolute genius! Absolutely fabulous! I saw some fantastic plays last year in New York. [Playwright] John Guare saw me and said, “Go immediately and see <i>The Pillowman</i> [by Martin McDonagh],” which I did, and it’s absolutely brilliant.</p><h5>On the computer</h5><table align="right" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><div class="mediainline"><span class="image standard"><img src="/media/view/31224/standard/imaginary_invalid.jpg" border="0" alt="Imaginary Invalid" title="Imaginary Invalid" width="300" height="204"></span></div><div class="mediainline"><span class="fine-print">From <i>The Imaginary Invalid</i>, performed over the </span></div><div class="mediainline"><span class="fine-print">summer at the American Conservatory Theater in </span></div><div class="mediainline"><span class="fine-print">San Francisco. </span><br></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>I think I’m the oldest person on Facebook.com. But after some of my friends find out, more of us oldies are going to join, because it’s so much fun. The site asks, “What are your aspirations and interests?” I said, “World peace and role-playing games.” Jon Wemette ’05 warned me off playing <i>World of Warcraft </i>because he saw how addicted another student was. I have an addictive nature, so I took Jon’s advice: I stayed away. I love <i>Age of Empires</i> and <i>Age of Mythology</i>. In some RPG realms, my warrior, Fluffy, is not to be messed with. I’d rather be an orc or a dwarf than a wizard any day.</p><h5>On new life</h5><p>When I got the news that my son’s girlfriend was pregnant, I was working with Rene Auberjonois, who was on <i>Star Trek</i> and is a theater guy. He said, “You will be goony. There’s a kind of love that you have for your grandchild that just makes you nuts.” And that is what happened. I can’t get enough of Corabella [born Feb. 15, 2007]. People say she looks like me; I think that’s because I have a fat, round face, but I’m thrilled that they think that. She and her parents are living with me. Eventually they’re going to have to go and have their own lives or something ridiculous like that.<br><br>I get a big infusion of hope from Corabella (and from my students). A bunch of old people will sit around and go, “Aw, the world’s going to hell.” I never say that; I feel like the world’s going to be in good hands. I look at this child who will outlive me, and I go, “Boy, the things you’re going to see.” I mean, there may be some horrific things, but there are going to be some fantastic things as well. <br><br><span class="fine-print">Photos: Frank Ward and Kevin Burns</span></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/114">Katherine Duke</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/116">Duke</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1382">Katherine Duke &#039;05</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1831">constance congdon</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1962">theater and dance</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/5896">faculty profiles</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6097">congdon</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6099">playwright</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6195">playwright-in-residence</a></div></div></div>Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:59:52 +0000kdduke54653 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2007_fall/mylifecongdon/node/54653#commentsShort Takeshttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2007_fall/amherstcreates/shorttakes/node/54558
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="fine-print">Compiled by Katherine Duke '05</span> </p><p><strong><em>The Accomplices</em>.</strong> <span class="gray">Music by The Accomplices (John Morris and Scott Haycock ’86). St. Louis: Perdition Records, 2006. 45 minutes. $14 CD.</span><br> Morris and Haycock met in graduate school and began performing at guitar circles and open mic nights around St. Louis. For their eponymous album, Haycock sings lead and shares writing duties with Morris. The disc—a blend of country, folk, rock and other styles—features guest appearances by some two dozen St. Louis musicians.<br><br><strong><em>Block Island: Rhode Island’s Jewel</em>.</strong> <span class="gray">Photographs</span> <span class="gray">by Malcolm Greenaway ’60. Beverly, Mass: Commonwealth Editions, 2007. 128 pp. $50 hardcover.</span><br> Greenaway and his wife honeymooned on Block Island and found it so enchanting that, in 1974, they moved there. Greenaway gave up a career as a philosophy professor to spend his life capturing in photographs the island’s beaches, boats, lighthouses and homes, eventually opening his own gallery. This volume includes 80 color images.<br><br><strong><em>Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man</em>.</strong> <span class="gray">By Jessica Bruder ’00. New York: Simon &amp; Schuster, 2007. 352 pp. $28.95 hardcover.</span><br> For eight days every September, tens of thousands converge on the playa of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for Burning Man, a festival of music, art and community named for the enormous human effigy that the revelers set ablaze. Bruder, a reporter for The Oregonian in Portland, Ore., has assembled images from 20 years of the event. The collection, which includes her own photographs, shows quirky sculptures, customized buses and “burners” wearing costumes or nothing at all.<br><br><strong><em>Franklin Evans or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times</em>.</strong> <span class="gray">By Walt Whitman; edited by Christopher Castiglia ’83 and Glenn Hendler. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. 147 pp. $21.95 paperback; $74.95 cloth.</span><br> Whitman’s biggest success during his lifetime was his only novel, <em>Franklin Evans</em> (1842), the story of a young man looking to strike it rich in New York City. Through Franklin’s drunken mishaps, Whitman shows the reader a city and nation facing moral crises and turbulent changes. Also in this volume, the editors include an extensive introduction; a short story and a fragment of a second novel by Whitman, both on the temperance movement; and an address on temperance by Abraham Lincoln. Castiglia is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.<br><br><strong><em>The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow that Changed the Course of World War II</em>.</strong> <span class="gray">By Andrew Nagorski ’69. New York: Simon &amp; Schuster, 2007. 384 pp. $27 hardcover.</span><br> A bestselling author, foreign correspondent and senior editor at <em>Newsweek International</em>, Nagorski draws from survivors’ eyewitness accounts and previously secret documents to describe the 1941-42 battle for Moscow. This turning point of the war cost a staggering number of lives, prompted the United States to throw its support behind the Soviets and brought Hitler his first defeat.<br><br><strong><em>Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement</em>.</strong> <span class="gray">Edited by Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage ’91. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2007, 285 pp. $18.95 paperback.</span><br> Can individual citizens help to end the world’s dependence on fossil fuels and ensure a green future? In <em>Ignition</em>, dozens of environmental scholars and activists provide instructions on how to do just that. Waage is an independent consultant on sustainability issues in North America, Europe and Africa.<br><br><strong><em>Making Psychotherapy Work: Collaborating Effectively with Your Patient</em>.</strong> <span class="gray">By Steven A. Frankel M.D. ’64, Madison, Conn.: Psychosocial Press, 2007. 351 pp. $47 paperback.</span><br>What is the key to success in psychotherapy? In his third book, the author explains his method, which is built upon a deep, cooperative connection between therapist and patient. Frankel is an associate clinical professor at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco and director of The Center for Collaborative Psychology and Psychiatry in Kentfield, Calif.<br><br><strong><em>Nation Building in South Korea</em>.</strong> <span class="gray">By Greg Brazinsky ’94. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 328 pp. $45 hardcover.</span> <br>Brazinsky, an assistant professor of history at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, describes how, during the Cold War, South Koreans took U.S. political and cultural influences and successfully adapted them to their own country’s needs and goals.<br><br><strong><em>What is Neurotheology?</em></strong> <span class="gray">By Brian C. Alston ’86. Charleston, S.C.: Booksurge, 2007. 61 pp. $12.99 paperback.</span><br> Everyone holds certain beliefs about morality, politics, the natural world and the supernatural. As Alston explains, neurotheology unites perspectives from many disciplines to investigate how the brain and mind generate, mediate, experience and interpret these beliefs. The author holds degrees from Hartford Seminary and Boston University School of Theology and is currently working toward a doctorate in clinical psychology from Argosy University. </p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/114">Katherine Duke</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/116">Duke</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6106">Amherst Creates</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6124">short takes</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6125">Haycock</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6126">Scott Haycock</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6127">Greenaway</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6128">Malcolm Greenaway</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6129">Bruder</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6130">Jessica Bruder</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6131">Castiglia</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6132">Christopher Castiglia</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6133">Nagorski</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/6134">Andrew Nagorski</a></div></div></div>Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:59:51 +0000kdduke54558 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2007_fall/amherstcreates/shorttakes/node/54558#comments